(Accelerated Strategic Computing White) A supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that was the fastest computer in the world when introduced in 2001. Used for weapons research, it was developed by IBM and made up of 512 16-way IBM RS/6000 computer systems. Its 8,192 processors provide 12.3 teraFLOPS of computing. Using 6TB of RAM and 160TB of disk space, ASC White (formerly ASCI White) is made from standard, off-the-shelf components.
Records Don't Hold for Long!
In 2005, the ASC Purple with 12,000 processors and a theoretical peak capacity of 93 teraFLOPS came online at Livermore. Even more amazing, so did a new machine called the Blue Gene/L, weighing in with 130,000 processors and an actual processing capacity of 270 teraFLOPS! Like the ASC White, the ASC Purple was slated to perform nuclear weapon simulations, while the Blue Gene/L was intended to study the behavior and movement of atomic molecules. See supercomputer sites.
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